Nobody asked the nephew

In a paint shop in Suez, the owner's nephew works the counter for the summer. He fetches tins, mixes colours from the chart, takes the money. He does what he is told, and he does it well.

One week he starts doing something nobody told him to do. He paints small squares of each popular colour on offcuts of board and hangs them along the wall, because he noticed customers could not picture a shade from a printed chip the size of a stamp. Nobody asked for it. Nobody will pay him more for it. If it looks silly, he is the one who will look silly.

That last part is why so few people do it. Following instructions is restful. Someone else carries the weight of the decision, and if it goes wrong the fault sits with them. Acting without being asked costs something: you have to decide it matters, decide you are allowed, and accept being seen to have tried.

So most of us wait. We wait to be told to learn the new skill, to raise the problem, to start the thing. We call it respect for how things are done.

Yet the children who come into that shop with their parents need no permission at all. They rearrange the brushes, ask why one blue is called sea and another sky, offer to carry a tin that is too heavy for them. Every one of us began like that.

The nephew has not learned anything new. He has simply held on to something most of us were slowly trained to put down.